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Camp Road

Station 10

Today the former camp
road leads from the roll call square to the religious remembrance sites and the
crematorium area. The barracks were situated to the right and left of the camp
road; their numbers are marked on today’s foundations. The first two barracks
were given a variety of special functions: the medical facilities for the
prisoners (on the right), the camp library, the prisoner canteen, later also an
orderly room, and a production workshop for the armaments industry (left).

The number of
barracks designated for medical purposes (known as the “Revier” or “sickbay”)
continued to grow over the years, eventually covering the first nine barracks
on the right-hand side. Medical care in the camp was nonetheless fully
inadequate. Moreover, these barracks were used by SS doctors to conduct brutal
experiments on humans. Returning to Dachau
in 1955, Nico Rost recalls these experiments:

“Even today, years and years after liberation,
the visitor is gripped by a certain fear upon entering the crossroad to what
was once block three. This was the barrack the prisoners feared the most – the
barrack of experiments, the realm of Doctor Rascher. Atrocities were committed
here which surpassed all the other cruelties carried out in German
concentration camps, SS doctors committed them on defenseless prisoners, abused
them for their so-called medical experiments: here prisoners were placed in icy
water until they froze, often for hours on end so as to identify the average
time that elapsed when it no longer made any sense to search for men who had
parachuted into the English Channel after being shot down. Bone transplants,
phlegmon and hyperthermia experiments were carried out in these barracks, ending
in agonizing death after horrific suffering.”

Prisoner allocation
to the barracks was based on Nazi racial ideology: German prisoners and those
from Western occupied countries were housed in the front barracks. Towards the
rear prisoners were allocated who the Nazis viewed as inferior: Poles,
prisoners from the Soviet Union, and Jews. At
the same time there were also special areas, for example an area fenced in within
the complex for punishment barracks, the quarantine blocks for new arrivals to
the camp, the so-called invalid blocks, and the clergy barracks, occupied
mainly by Polish priests.

Located behind the
prisoner barracks were the disinfection barracks, where clothing was
disinfected, hutches for rabbit breeding, and the camp nursery. Today these are
the sites of the religious memorials. The tour proceeds first to the
crematorium area, located behind the bridge on the left-hand side.

Group of prisoners in front of the infirmary, secretly made picture, Rudolf Cisar, spring 1943.